I've been wondering about the situation with regard to elf mages during the Long March. Did they only come from the ranks of children of liberated parents or did elves who had received training from Tevinter humans comprise the first wave? Currently if someone demonstrates magical ability in Tevinter they are immediately elevated above the ranks of non-mages, even non-mage nobility. Has that always been the case? So would an elf mage identify more with non-mage elves or human mages? The Canticle of Shartan describes his elves using bows in the battle and other texts mention how they made weapons from anything they could get hold of. Naturally I suppose any reference to elf mages assisting in the fight would have been expunged but I wonder if they did?
You see I'm still trying to work out why the Dalish, and thus presumably the leadership in the Dales before them, have mages as their Keepers and you can only be a Keeper if you are a mage. Why would a people who had been suppressed and enslaved by mages, which would have included elven mages (if the rules in Ancient Tevinter were the same as today) have allowed it to become the norm that only mages could rule? Unless, of course, some senior elf mages, who had defected from Tevinter hierarchy because their race prevented their ascension to the rank of Magister, decided they would rather rule their own people. It would also explain why the focus of the new elven nation seemed to be the recovery of knowledge from an old elven empire in order to create a new one, rather than simply the establishment of the homeland that Shartan desired and why they pretty quickly dropped the religion that he had converted to.
During the period between the end of the First Blight and the start of Andraste's Exalted March things were pretty chaotic with regard to worship, many people having lost faith in the old gods. It is not beyond the bounds of possibility that elf mages during this period, who were free to conduct research managed to turn up some old references to Arlathan in Tevinter archives and old elven ruins and took it from there. The ruins in Ferelden seemed to show that humans and elves had co-existed in the past and possibly even worshipped the same gods, but possibly under different names. I just can't see how the refugees of elven slaves would have recovered knowledge so quickly with regard to language and culture or preserved it during their years of slavery beyond anything more than a few folk tales. It does make sense if the source of knowledge was actually elf mages who had already been in a privileged position and then defected, with rather more lofty aspirations than the majority of refugees.
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